David Richard Koff (September 24, 1939 – March 6, 2014) was an American maker of documentary films, social activist, writer, researcher, and editor. His interest in social and economic justice has shaped a career largely spent exploring human rights, colonialism, resistance movements, racism, labor unions, and the oppression and exploitation of undocumented workers in America. However, he veered from political concerns long enough to write and co-produce the film People of the Wind, for which, in 1976, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.
Early years: from the U.S. to Africa
Born in Philadelphia, Koff grew up in Van Nuys, California. After graduating from Stanford University with an honors degree in political science in 1961, Koff traveled to West Africa, teaching in Sierra Leone and participating in a voluntary work-camp project in Ghana. As a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, he returned to Africa, this time to East Africa, where he did academic research as well as writing and editing at the Nairobi-based East African Publishing House (EAPH). He was the uncredited ghostwriter of Field Marshal John Okello's memoir, Revolution in Zanzibar (EAPH, 1967), and, under the pseudonym Richard Wakohozi worked closely with Waruhiu Itote (General China) on his memoir, Mau Mau General (EAPH, 1967). Koff also traveled to Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Madagascar. Based in England from late 1969 to mid-1974, he returned to East Africa to film a series of documentary films for four months in 1970, then moved back to Nairobi in late 1974 to work as an editor for Transafrica Publishers.
The Black Man's Land Trilogy
Koff's early films reflect this period. In addition to many short projects, he produced and directed (with partner Anthony Howarth) and wrote The Black Man's Land Trilogy, released in 1972–73, narrated by Tanzanian broadcaster Msindo Mwinyipembe and with music by Peter Frampton. The three films, still widely used in university African Studies programs, are White Man's Country, Mau Mau, and Kenyatta. The first explores the early stages of European settlement and colonial rule, and African resistance to it. The second focuses on the state of emergency declared by the British in Kenya in 1952, including the creation of the myth of a Mau Mau terrorist group to justify the suppression of the African nationalist movement. The third film is a critical biographical portrait of Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta. Koff's use of newsreels, photographs and then-contemporaneous interviews with those who lived through this tumultuous period, has been praised for its authenticity and archival value. In particular, material from the Trilogy was included in Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, a 2007 film about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Kenyan environmental activist, made by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater|
People of the Wind
In 1976, Koff joined again with Howarth to make a documentary of a different kind, People of the Wind. The film follows the Bakhtiari, nomadic pastoralists of Iran, as they make their way from winter to summer pastures. People of the Wind was nominated in 1976 for an Academy Award as Best Feature Documentary. It was narrated by actor James Mason.
Blacks Britannica
In 1978, Koff returned to England for six months to make the film Blacks Britannica. Originally commissioned by the Boston public television station WGBH, the film later "raised hackles" at the station due to its perceived overtly political content. The ensuing legal battle over censorship, the right to make final cuts, and airing and distribution, was widely debated in the media at the time.